On the topic of food: I bought and installed a diner in the runtime for Daz Studio but I can't find it. Maybe it is in the sub-folder called scenes or places. I really should organize the categories in Daz Studio 4.

...cheese & crackers with a glass of wine, or pistachios (my one big weakness and they've been on sale at the market for like the last month). Don't like anything oily such as crisps as that meeds up the keyboard

Complaint: This up & down, freeze/thaw weather is hell on the road surfaces but I suspect that when the bus ahead of you disappears it's time to put on the brakes.

And right outside my house is a huge hole getting bigger by the hour. My windows rattle when a big truck hits it square on. I think I could easily hide a basketball in it now.

...here it's been slight thawing then freezing which with foot and vehicle traffic over the last couple days has left the walkways that were not cleared driveways, and sidestreets covered in snow that was compacted down to 3' - 4" of uneven ice making it very easy to slip and fall. Still getting freezing rain here in the central neighbourhoods while in most of the rest of the city it is just rain now.

Today we had a brief bit of snow before it turned to freezing rain and then just rain. Even though it is slowly warming with the persistent rain, the 14" of snow we got last week isn't going away easy especially the hard frozen stuff I mentioned of above. It will probably take until Thursday for the area to be safely walkable again.

...well day #8 of the Winterpocalypse 2016 here. Street conditions are slowly improving, however sidewalks are still for the most part a mix of ice, slush, and water, often with water pooling in icy footprints. The ground is still covered in several inches of now soggy wet snow in spite of almost a full day of rain today.

Rain and mid 40s through Sunday which triggered an alert for possible local flooding Then next week it gets cold again with lows in the 20s once more. This winter has been one of the worst for cold, snow, and ice in th last several years. I don't remember this many days with low temps in the 20s or lower since I moved here.

Need to go for X-rays tomorrow at a nearby med centre and hoping the walks will be clear enough by then I can leave the house without the fear of slipping and falling.

I always wondered about those when I was a kid. They'd be on the back, or inside in the back, of comic books. Poor, so never sent away for them. I had a hard time believing that they could actually work. I suspected that they had an image of a girl in lingerie etched into the glasses or something.

I always wondered about those when I was a kid. They'd be on the back, or inside in the back, of comic books. Poor, so never sent away for them. I had a hard time believing that they could actually work. I suspected that they had an image of a girl in lingerie etched into the glasses or something.

Dana

I never bought them either, but conveniently just a few days ago I heard the explanation about how they worked. They produced a double image which was coindicent but slightly larger so that it produced a faint outline around the object in view. A five year old might believe it was X-Ray vision, but a clever seven year old would moan that he got taken by the scam. Sort of like Ralphie discovering the true purpose of Little Orphan Annie's magic decoder ring. ("Be sure to drink your Ovaltine") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdA__2tKoIU

The best thing I ever purchased through a comic book advertisement was a course in basic science. I forget the details now but I must have been about 14 or 15 and I scrounged up $5.00 every month to get the next kit. Each kit was actually a nice little package of tools, materials, and documents covering the basics of various areas of science. There was a course on photography that had small trays, developer & fixer, (used vinegar for stop bath), photo paper, a red light bulb, and a simple frame for making contact prints. There was an optics kit that had various length cardboard tubes, several lenses, and directions on making telescopes, microscopes, and photo enlarger by swapping the tubes and lenses as needed. There were a few electronics kits that had electron tubes, transformers, resistors, capacitors, light sensitive resistors, neon tubes, etc. to make amplifiers, stroboscopes, and even voice transmission over lightbeams, (remember this was in about 1962 !!). There was a kit for glass blowing. A kit for studying radioactivity that included a little bag of Uranium ore, and parts to make a cloud chamber. I can't remember all the kits but I learned a lot of basic knowlege about several subjects, at a regulated pace. I owe enthusiasm for science & technology and my career to that little $5/month set of kits.

A lot of the parts were made of cardboard and bakelite but the lenses were glass, the electron tubes were real, it was cheap but simple and functional but of course not the highest quality. The performance of my photo enlarger was very disappointing. 15 years later I sunk a fortune into a top of the line enlarger and was finally happy for a few years! Then digital came along and I sold it for a pittance.

The performance of my photo enlarger was very disappointing. 15 years later I sunk a fortune into a top of the line enlarger and was finally happy for a few years! Then digital came along and I sold it for a pittance.

I still have a lot of my film camera equipment; but I haven't had a darkroom since I was in college some 50+ years ago. I used to love to develop and print my own pictures back then.

...still have my old 35mm camera kit. To get a digital camera with the same capabilities would cost me ...well, a lot today. Sad that my favourite films Kodachrome and Ektachrome 64 are no longer available. Nice colour saturation and really crisp photos. Used to have a box camera that required 620 film which also is no longer available. That simple old camera took some wonderful photos. Back then getting different effects required filters and messing around with the processing phase. So easy today to simply shoot a mediocre image and make it look good in post instead of having to get it right the first time.

I guess this is the other reason why I strive to get as close to perfection as I can in the render pass.

My first really good camera was a Rolleicord that I saved up for and bought second hand. While I don't have that particular Rolleicord I do have another Rolleicord as well as a Rolleiflex. I also have an Exakta 35mm camera and a number of lenses for it. With an adapter I can use these lenses on my Canon digital camera and I think they are better than the lenses that came with the Canon.

...still have my old 35mm camera kit. To get a digital camera with the same capabilities would cost me ...well, a lot today. Sad that my favourite films Kodachrome and Ektachrome 64 are no longer available. Nice colour saturation and really crisp photos. Used to have a box camera that required 620 film which also is no longer available. That simple old camera took some wonderful photos. Back then getting different effects required filters and messing around with the processing phase. So easy today to simply shoot a mediocre image and make it look good in post instead of having to get it right the first time.

I guess this is the other reason why I strive to get as close to perfection as I can in the render pass.

I still have my camera equipment as well. Not that it's any good these days. Two Canon A1 bodies, both of which have something wrong with them. A speed winder that I bought from a catalog store named Spiratone. Lenses, filters, etc. And my Hasselblad 500CM with two 220 backs and one 120 back and one Polaroid back; normal lens, wide angle lens, 2X converter, Spiratone Matte box and filters and such. I had a nice strobe system for the Hasselblad that I used for shooting weddings, with tow mini batteries and a great mounting bracket for it and the camera...Stroboframe? Can't remember for sure. The flash was dyna something. The wedding setup cost me $2,500 back in the mid eighties! I used a pro lab in Pawtucket, RI, for my wedding processing and for portrait work. Later I did some modeling shoots and I brought those to a rental darkroom place. I had a membership there and I'd print contact sheets and then the enlargements that I wanted. I did some B&W work, and did the darkroom and development of prints. Smelly. For color, they had a machine that could do pretty large prints. Color was picky, chemicals had to be just the right mix and just the right temperature, so the machine was better. Go in the room, shut the door, feel your way around and put the exposed paper in the machine, face down. Several minutes later it would come out the front, which was outside the room. I started doing 11" x 14" prints, but soon I moved to 16" x 20". My scenics were beautiful at that size! So were the fashion shots. I loved doing the enlargements myself. I could get the color and exposure just right rather than counting on a lab tech to decide what was right...or worse, just doing the average based on whatever he/she, or the automated processor, thought should be the average in the scene. Bracketing was useless when someone else does the proofs with that method! They all look exactly the same. I had a nice set of White Lightning studio strobes for portraits and fashion shoots. Not expensive, but performed well. And a stand for background paper rolls. Once rented a 4x5 view camera for a weekend and did some commercial type still lifes. Man, 16x20 enlargements were sharp and clear, no grain at all!!! Of course, the Hasselblad shots were sharp at that size, too. But the view camera prints were amazing! It was fun using that thing. Now, I recently checked pricing on the Hasselblads, the new digital models. A decent setup with several lenses and accessories could almost pay off my mortgage!!! That's not happening. They do make a digital back for the 500CM, but even that costs as much as a low end car! sigh